In Lean Times, Biotech Grains Are Less Taboo

[flashl]

Source: NY Times

Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops.

In Japan and South Korea, some manufacturers for the first time have begun buying genetically engineered corn for use in soft drinks, snacks and other foods. Until now, to avoid consumer backlash, the companies have paid extra to buy conventionally grown corn. But with prices having tripled in two years, it has become too expensive to be so finicky.

...

In the United States, wheat growers and marketers, once hesitant about adopting biotechnology because they feared losing export sales, are now warming to it as a way to bolster supplies. Genetically modified crops contain genes from other organisms to make the plants resistance to insects, herbicides or disease. Opponents continue to worry that such crops have not been studied enough and that they might pose risks to health and the environment.

“I think it’s pretty clear that price and supply concerns have people thinking a little bit differently today,” said Steve Mercer, a spokesman for U.S. Wheat Associates, a federally supported cooperative that promotes American wheat abroad.

NY Times

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/21crop.html

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Now we know where the 'food crisis' is leading us.

[soothsayer]

1. Ugh. Frankenfood. I loathe Monsatan!

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Don't know why. GMO crops yield less than non-GMO crops.

[notadmblnd]

3. So they admit; it's all about forcing GM food on us?

Create shortages, run up the prices to a point people can no longer afford to eat; and in order to survive, we'll gladly turn to genetically modified food?

[Karenina]

5. Bingo!

[GliderGuider]

4. Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/13/8405/">Exposed: The Great GM Crops Myth

Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.

The study - carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt - has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.

Professor Barney Gordon grew a Monsanto GM soybean and an almost identical conventional variety in the same field. The modified crop produced only 70 bushels of grain per acre, compared with 77 bushels from the non-GM one.

The GM crop - engineered to resist Monsanto’s own weedkiller, Roundup - recovered only when he added extra manganese, leading to suggestions that the modification hindered the crop’s take-up of the essential element from the soil. Even with the addition it brought the GM soya’s yield to equal that of the conventional one, rather than surpassing it.

This little setback won't stop Monsanto/ADM/Cargill etc. from trying to lock up the world's food supply, though.